The Only Thing the Nunes Memo Proves Is That It Was Massively Overhyped

The much-anticipated Nunes memo, released Friday after weeks of feverish build-up on the far-right, appears to be a dud. The declassified report accuses a group of current and former Justice Department and F.B.I. officials—including James Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, and current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—of approving applications to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page without disclosing that ex-British intelligence spy Christopher Steele, who compiled an intelligence dossier used in the warrant, was paid by Democratic sources and harbored anti-Trump bias. The most damning piece of evidence is the allegation that McCabe had testified in December that the warrant would not have been sought without the dossier, although two sources subsequently told The Daily Beast that particular claim is not true. Nowhere in the four-page memo is it noted that Page had already been on the F.B.I.’s radar, after he was targeted for recruitment by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service years earlier.

The consequences could be more than just a letdown for Trump. Rather than providing a smoking gun to discredit the Mueller investigation, it now seems that the president may have needlessly antagonized the F.B.I., and added to the perception that he is obstructing the Russia probe, with little political payoff. Some within the White House seemed to have anticipated that outcome, and had moved to downplay the memo’s significance in the days before its release. According to The Washington Post, Chief of Staff John Kelly had cautioned “that releasing the memo would not risk national security but that the document was not as compelling as some of its advocates had promised Trump.” Axios picked up whispers that several White House aides who had seen the memo were “fairly underwhelmed” and worried that it would be a lemon.

Trump, however, leapt at the opportunity to release the memo even before he saw it. “There was never any hesitation,” a presidential adviser told the Post. “He wanted it out.” Trump’s calculation is personal: he reportedly believes the memo constitutes proof that the Deep State is out to get him. Yet in approving its disclosure, the president took an enormous risk, undermining an already-strained relationship with F.B.I. head Christopher Wray, whose agency took the rare step of releasing a statement on Wednesday citing “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Wray reportedly expressed his concerns to the president directly; according to CNN, the F.B.I. director was “raising hell” over the document, prompting concerns among top White House aides that its release would prompt his resignation. (A former D.O.J. colleague of Wray’s told Politico that such concerns are unwarranted, saying that Wray will “tough this one out . . . he will understand his leadership is needed.”)

In the days leading up to the memo’s release, White House aides were torn. “[There’s] some back-and-forth on whether to actually do it,” an administration source told Axios on Thursday night. “If it really is a dud and the memo really doesn’t say a hell of a lot, why would you risk pissing off Wray?” As the Post reported, however, Trump saw releasing the memo as a way to put pressure on Rosenstein, perhaps even to lay the groundwork for his recusal or dismissal. Other informal advisers surrounding the president, such as Fox News host Sean Hannity, were adamant that releasing the memo was necessary to purge the F.B.I. of alleged anti-Trump bias. “Our sources are telling us that the abuse of power is far bigger than Watergate,” Hannity said last week. “What we're talking about tonight is the systematic abuse of power, the weaponizing of those powerful tools of intelligence and the shredding of our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights.”

Experts doubt that’s the case, even if the Steele dossier was, in fact, a major component of the disputed FISA warrant. “I just can’t imagine they would have relied only on the dossier,” Asha Rangappa, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who has applied for surveillance warrants, told BuzzFeed News. “There would have been a massive case file that could have been open for months or years with surveillance logs and interviews with sources.” Nor does it much matter if Steele, or the Democratic Party, were politically motivated when they sought opposition research on Trump. Legally, it likely doesn’t matter whether the sources behind the information were biased, as long as there was reasonable cause to believe it was true.

While Memo-gate may now fizzle, the long-term implications of the episode could be dire. Wray’s tenure at the F.B.I., however long he remains, is now dented, the latest casualty in Trump’s long, drawn-out version of a Saturday Night Massacre—a slow chipping-away at the D.O.J. that has claimed Comey, prompted McCabe to resign, and targeted Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “This is clearly the most aggressive thing that [Trump] has done, public relations-wise, to try and brush back the Justice Department,” Michael Schmidt of The New York Timestold MSNBC, adding that special counsel Robert Mueller has “been spending a lot of time looking at his conduct in office. It’s become increasingly clear . . . that there is an obstruction-of-justice [decision] that Mueller is going to have to make.” Now that the memo appears to have fallen flat, Trump’s push to weaponize it against Mueller may blow back in his face.